Leekspin: Loituma Girl and the origin of Miku's leek

Hatsune Miku spinning a leek to Ievan Polkka looks like the start of the joke. It isn't. More than a year earlier, a four-frame Flash loop of Orihime from Bleach was already hypnotizing people who had never heard of Vocaloid.

That loop is Leekspin, also known as Loituma Girl. The vegetable in her hands is the whole argument: in Japanese it is negi, the English dub called it a leek, and Miku inherited the mix-up as if the onion had always been hers.

How did the Leekspin meme start?

The footage was not drawn as a meme. It is a handful of frames from episode two of the Bleach anime, the gag where Orihime Inoue twirls a bunching onion while talking groceries with Ichigo Kurosaki and Rukia Kuchiki. Someone cut that gesture, looped it, and glued it to the scat section of Ievan Polkka as recorded by the Finnish quartet Loituma on their 1995 album — released in the United States as Things of Beauty.

The clip is usually credited to a Russian LiveJournal user, g_r_e_e_n, who shared it on April 23, 2006. Mentions of the same loop show up a few days earlier, but that is the date the internet kept. In May 2006 the dedicated site leekspin.com went up, and the Flash jumped from LiveJournal onto the usual mid-2000s conveyor belt: blogs, GeoCities, MySpace, and 2channel and 4chan. The loop itself is tiny: four frames, about 27 seconds of Loituma, then it starts again.

The song is Finnish, not Russian. Lyrics for Ievan Polkka — “Ieva’s Polka” — were printed in 1928 by Eino Kettunen over an older folk tune. What the meme uses is the later scat, phonetic Finnish with no story you can look up on a lyrics page. That is why people spent years hunting for “the real words” and only found the rest of the song.

Parodies piled up on YouTube through the summer of 2006. Loituma started getting fan mail from countries that had never booked a Finnish folk quartet. The hypnotic part is the same four frames, over and over, while the voice keeps going — the kind of clip you leave open because closing the tab feels like interrupting a machine.

Leek, green onion, or negi?

Search negi (ねぎ) in Japanese and you land on the same object people still wave at Miku concerts. It is a Japanese bunching onion, closer to a Welsh onion or a fat green onion than to the European leek you cook with potatoes. English-speaking fans still say “leek” because the Bleach dub used that word, and because the domain was leekspin.com. The name stuck harder than the botany.

So the old question — is it a green onion or a leek? — has a precise answer and a better cultural one. Botanically it is negi. On the English-speaking web it is a leek. Miku’s item is both, depending on which language you are standing in.

Hatsune Miku, Hachune, and Ievan Polkka

When Nico Nico Douga launched in March 2007, a long loop of the same Flash was among the clips that took root on day one. Attention then shifted from the onion to the song: MAD remixes, live clips of Loituma, anything tagged ロイツマ. The version most people meet now still did not come from LiveJournal. In early September 2007, producer Otomania posted a cover on Nico Nico Douga: Hatsune Miku singing the Loituma scat, with a chibi drawing — later treated as its own character, Hachune Miku (はちゅねミク) — shaking the onion. That video is the reason the vegetable left Orihime and became a Vocaloid prop.

The Hatsune Miku voicebank had only just gone on sale. This was not a corporate mascot campaign. It was a producer using a brand-new Vocaloid bank on a meme the Japanese internet already knew. Among the early tracks that pulled Miku out of niche software forums, this is the one that stuck a physical object to her. Later official art, a Hachune Nendoroid, and Hatsune Miku: Project DIVA tutorial songs kept the onion in her hand as if it had always been in the character sheet.

Keep the years in a straight line and the chain is short. 1995: Loituma records the scat. 2006: Orihime loops on LiveJournal. 2007: Otomania hands the same joke to Miku. After that, a lot of people who have never watched Bleach still know the girl with the leek — they just think her hair is turquoise.